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December 09, 2009

It was refreshing to see ourselves back on the world leaderboard with regards to digital appetites.

For years, it seemed like the Canuck webheads were the most broadband connected nation and then we became the nation that really embraced Facebook first.

After seeing Canada drop to as low as 11th on certain digital behaviors, now we have reclaimed our seat as world e-leaders, this time as being the world's most socially connected nation.

According to Forresters, 57% of online Canadians jump on social networks at least once a month while U.S. landed in 2nd place at 51% and the UK taking bronze at 38%. 80% of online Canadians had participated at some point in social networks.

#5 - high levels of urbanization - social networks take root first in urban areas - My Space started in L.A. with Facebook getting rooted in university towns first followed by city areas, to the uninformed, Canada may seem like an idyllic nordic landscape with people living in log cabins and igloos - in fact, Canada is a highly urbanized nation - 44.6% of its people are in it's top 6 cities

#7 - world view - unlike a majority of Americans, we tend to take a larger world view and draw inspiration from a wider circle of people and cultures - it's why Canadians are known as the most lovable backpackers and Canada is viewed as the #2 country brand in the world - we love to connect with far-reaching others

#8 - shunning media influence - in Canada, we have become used to US media dominant influence for the last 40 years - social networking finally allows us to share amongst our own - its why our country's Facebook page has 346,000 fans and the USA's has only 297,000

So we punch far more powerfully than our numbers online, even though we have the 36th ranked in terms of population but are ranked 11th in online population. Why the heck do our businesses adopt social web culture and technologies so much later than their counterparts?

Forrester's tool has some limitations and for the life of me, I'll never understand the math, but the intriguing part is Canada has a fairly engaged online population and the participation by age declines over time, it never really falls off a cliff.

November 30, 2009

I find it surprising how there are two very mistaken and large camps of people who deny the reality of the influencers:

The first camp tends to embrace open source, democratic web practice but completely ignores the fact that even in a democracy effort and enthusiasm is not blind,. There are only so many people who run for office, go on the campaign trail, sign up as party members and in most cultures, less than half even vote themselves. In practice, democracy has a fair degree of inequality of interest.

The second camp believes that there is an elitist posse of Jimmy Choo-wearing, Armani-suit garbed celebrity insiders who are the pathway to influence regardless of category. So get the Paris Hiltons and Lindsay Lohans of your world, and generate the pathway to buzz and word of mouth gold.

Both camps, if they're truly interested in spreading their ideas, fail to comprehend the power of "The Influencers". They are blinded to their own idiosyncratic beliefs or tap into very shallow knowledge of how ideas diffuse.

It simply is true - influencers are the high priests of your word of mouth. If anything, the social web has revealed just how much clout they do have.

In most categories - a contingent of less than 15% of your audience represents the majority of credibility, collaborative and word of mouth capacity that your compnay, brand, cause or idea can feasibly generate.

These people are not cloned. There are six key types of influencers, each with different motivations, different talents and different traits, and each important for ideas to cross the chasm: tastemakers, trendspotters, opinion leaders, experts, grassroots celebrities and social ringleaders.

Many of these constituencies are ignored in favour of the flashiest, the earliest, the loudest or the crankiest.

Regardless of your professional or personal orientation, Gladwell had it right "the answer is the success of any type of social epidemic relies on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of gifts."

November 19, 2009

It's prediction season again and we've pulled together our best prognostications for the 2010 social media season.

Here they are:

1) Attention overload and filtering - Twitter , spammers and aggregated content engines have finally shortened our attention window to a nanosecond - it is beginning to be tough to separate the good stuff on the web vs. the bad - A-listing, really smart SEO and SMO and private huddle spaces will become popular in 2010 social media as a result.

2) Brand Community building - strong companies that have used internal collaboration start extending their tentacles out into their customer and partner networks - the ones doing it already will do more (apparently 93% of them) and new players will enter the branded network ring (estimated to be 60% of them according to Gartner) - some will fail, others will succeed.

3) Local & Grassroots - with the number of context relevant iPhone apps, the advancement of mashups in mapping and the intriguing business model of geo-tagged news and promotion, as it once was so it is again - the world is local. 50% of a person's Facebook network is local - wo whereas we might want to have people think Global, when it comes to social, they act local.

4) Monetization - newspapers have reversed course and are charging money for premium content as a survival play, Hulu is doing it - will Youtube be next?, Twitter will start introducing revenue generating options in their 2010 year...even though we've had 5 years to the contrary, money truly does make the world go round, this time it needs to be real money not just that VC and takeover stuff

5) Radical Reinvention of Agencies - 50 questions asked and the number 1 thing that marketers can agree on is that agencies need to reinvent themselves to stay competitive - consultant specialization, new compensation schemes, customer experience owners, industrial, product and brand design, representing customers as an alliance, somebody needs to reinvent this colossus to ensure its future survival

6) Employee Social Media - what used to be a hindrance - a large, bureaucratic/disconnected culture, might now be a boost to fight off smaller more nimbler adversaries. Big iconic companies have not been able to marshal its scale in social media until now - we will see many more big companies dive into the social web in a well-coordinated fashion like Zappos, Direct to Dell and Best Buy's Twelpforce (now over 14,000 deep) with more bodies and resources

7) Brandividuals - borrowing the term from David Armano that suggests personal brands = corporate brands - the myth that you can have a personal life and a professional life in social media simultaneously continues to wither away - it may be sad for many,but transparency and open relationships is the new mantra = we don't want to know who you are targeting, we want to know who was involved...and we will in 2010 - as a related development, we will see personal online brands link up more closely with companies as Scott Monty has done with Ford

8) Content Syndication - those with the ability to connect and extend out their social media footprint will win in the future of the internet - sure, use your community site as a headquarters but establish some sentry posts, patrol stations and love bunkers on the perimeter of the web - with 70% of what's on the web expected to be user generated or social by 2013 - you need to be everywhere

9) Community Managers/Evangelists - community efforts are notoriously underfunded but yet staffed by these brilliantly talented individuals - expect companies to add resources here and industries that have stayed away to start recruiting for these Renaissance frontline people that operate between social media and the company

10) Collaborative Real Time Communication - with Google Wave, never again will you be stuck in an email back and forth, think about WebEx for consumers, think BaseCamp for parent user groups - old user unfriendly, techy-loved wikis are now being pushed aside for content rich, seamless-to-use collaborative areas that Aunt Ethel, cousin Bob and tech-illiterate CEO can now use

11) Joint Ventures - if you are in the business of satisfying customer wants and maxing out their experience, then you are in the business of collaborating with other companies sometimes equals - as was the case with the Nike+/Apple jogging community - expect to see some of that spirit of collaboration end up as brand alliances online

12) Portability of Social Media - whether it's Mobifests,interactive signage, Pico projectors, roll up TVs - the hardware we're using has become so small and smart that a lot of live events don't require staging anymore - smart mobs, instant film fests and social media-driven live games are the new live entertainment and sports, given the whole idea of augmented reality enabled by these advancements, we may hear more of the term "Transocialmedia Play" in the future

14) Word of Mouth Marketing - despite all form of exciting new tech and media advancements, the power of the human voice still ranks #1 ...and rising. Engaged word of mouth still drives decision-making (about 2/3rds of it if you're an average category) and is expected to grow faster than any other form of marketing spend. With the crushing weight of new media and product choice, the only way to keep things straight for people seems to be to follow the advice of a trusted friend.

15) Math Marketing and Data Visualization - not only is there a crushing weight of media and products, we've not hit breaking points on information too. To be able to pull out insight from the excrement of data, smart left brains have teamed up with smart right brains to look at interesting ways to visualize data. Look to advancements that will wend their way into social media and make tag clouds and social graphs look like simple hobby horses in the future.

November 16, 2009

Traditional world Oxford Dictionary received some new world buzz today by adding "unfriend" to its 2010 dictionary as a doff of the cap to the mainstreaming of our new fangled social web.

What they forgot to tell you were the 12 other words that didn't make the grade but were equally valid social media additions.

Characteritis - the inability to find the least important characters to ensure a tweet fits under the 140 character limit, particularly an issue when trying to credit the initial author and retweeter addresses and still be content rich

Z-badge - the perhaps unfair branding and discrimination of people in social media as shallow who overuse "z" instead of "s" for either overzealous panache, unwise street cred or lack of mindfulness to grammar rules, likely deserved but superficial profiling nonetheless

Facebook Limbo - the inability to complete any task in Windows because a Facebook instant message is stuck sending to its intended recipient

Times Squaring 2.0 - frequently seen on blogs related to internet marketing, the over widgeting of blogs creating an uncoordinated patchwork quilt of colours, badges, ads and app. functionality where the actual content might be the least recognizable item on the page

Trojan Horse Vanity - the thanking of people only to ensure your own self-motivated messages get out to more people i.e. a tweet -"thanks @joan @jim @jack for buying my new best selling book, smart people like you make it all worthwhile"

Personal brand still in boxes - the appearance of a new member to a social network with no profile picture, friends, posts or information - as when a person just moves into a house and has all furniture still in boxes a month alter

Prosciutto - if spam is malicious unwanted email and bacn is self-inflicted mail that is wanted but not well valued than prosciutto is the unexpected message that you really do want to receive and are surprised to see pop up

SlothReturns - the response to a friend who wants you to attend event/make a contribution/write a post or some other item requiring action, with a reply that expends the least amount of energy possible yet acknowledges receipt of message - i.e. "congrats XoXo" , on Facebook commonly the "like this" function for updates

Jay Leno-ing - in social media terms, somebody who has way to much exposure for their own talent, not necessarily funny or insightful but remains in the public eye based on friend's support and establishment credibility @aplusk rings a bell

RonPauled - the initial fast growth of your community to 100 members in the hopes of going to 1 million only to be stuck at 253 three months later, named after libertarian Republican candidate for President in 2009

Sajaking - somebody who is oversyndicating their content on way too many networks, polluting the web with the same boring stuff - named after the host Pat Sajak, host of the most syndicated show on TV Wheel of Fortune

Any others worthy? If Oxford won't accept them, then maybe we'll just have to ask our old friend Webster's to step in.

November 12, 2009

The Digital Day at Marketing Week in Toronto has just wrapped up and I was reading Head of Google Canada's Jonathan Lister's summary of the 5 points that today's marketer's should be preoccupied with, although self serving, they're good ones:

- the web changes so quickly, what has worked in the past may not work in the future

- online and offline ads should complement, 2/3rds of searches are a result of offline media

- effective search strategy to overcome the now 600 million registered domain names is required

- don't be afraid to jump on an emerging trend and stake out space in a new area, his bet was mobile and online video, perhaps not surprising given Google's Android and YouTube stake in the areas

Trust me, I have great respect for what Google does, they have the Midas touch in entering new web areas that their many competitors envy.

I do however take two issues with Jonathan's list above:

The first, his points on #1 and #5 about the unpredictability of the web trump his point #4 about data's preeminence over opinion - if you need to take a leap into the unknown or at best the murky future - it's instinct and insight that is going to get you there, not machinations of data.

If you had straightlined any information or data that existed 5 years ago, most would have missed the social networking trend, the trend to video, the move away from blogging to microblogging by healthy margins. The people that truly tapped into these waves were conceptual geniuses not data junkies. Smart moves in mobile will not likely be data-driven but innovation-driven tapping into a Whole New Mind - moving away from the information age to the conceptual age. Data is great for operations and some sober judgment and guidance, but it can hamstrung people away from envisioning a new, enlightened future.

Marketing needs to get rigorous on all fronts, online data measurement is just one of them.

As I stare out at the landscape of CMOs and VPs of marketing, they are under considerable scrutiny and pressure to perform and have absolutely no spare time. And if there was an act of malice I could lay at their feet, it's their complete adherence to data at the upper levels, and the poor ability to adequately equate risk with reward, balance the future with present reality and use smart intuition with data.

If anything, we have created a generation of marketing "scoreboard watchers". Whether it's Nielsen TV data, PMB print data, Google analytics or Radian social media metrics, marketers are drowning in the vomit of their own data. Data without some type of filtered insight is a negative undertow on a brand owner's aptitude to pivot and move quickly. Data without some type of frontline organizational leadership falls on deaf ears. Data without some type of deep seeded connection to the marketplace and empathy for the customer is blind. So unless Google can magically double the time spent in an average marketer's week, data crunching may need to take a justifiable back seat to these other concerns.

Think about it - if you are truly going to build value in any substantive (and hopefully measurable) way, it's likely because you do at most 3 things well, I mean really well, in one given year (a smart colleague once told me this - I thought he was lazy at the time but he has proved to be right).

The successful marketers? I guarantee you at least 2 out of 3 of those things were outcomes from really smart bets not really good actuary work.

Data is great for monitoring and managing day to day operations, unfortunately an over-reliance on it to guide strategy and plan in this fast changing marketplace, is a recipe for small ideas and late to market status.

Hate to rain down on Google's parade, I'm sure they'll do well without my advocacy. But what we need, what we really and truly need in marketing in 2010, more than anything else, is truly enlightened souls and passionate customer advocates to lead the way and less detached and formulaic number crunchers.

November 08, 2009

By my rough estimation, there are about 300,000 people floating around Twitter claiming to be "social media experts".

Good for them. They are riding a wave of popularity rarely seen since the days of the dot.com bubble. If they can monetize or take advantage of this fever, even better for them.

As you can see by the Google Trends graph above , "social media" has rocketed up the popularity charts and took a sharp "hockey stick" turn up in the start of 2009. Some of the other strategies and tactics terms that my company Agent Wildfire has focused on (word of mouth, buzz, community) have taken a popularity backseat to this chart-topping beast called "social media"

As a Warren Buffett contrarian advocate, I believe the fever pitch around "social media" - the term and the tools is short-sighted. Be forewarned, when something moves this fast, this quickly - there usually is a letdown factor on the other side of the ride (file under Alaskan gold rush, backyard nuclear bunkers, zoot suits, disco, Y2K, Enron, Madoff-Ponzie, Avian flu, ethanol as biofuel) .

Why? Businesses continue to struggle to tap into social media as a source of value. The earliest of early adopters have jettisoned Facebook even though it's death star continues to spread. You hear a creeping resistance to the mere mention to the term - similar to the treatment we now give to the haggard terms Web 2.0, social bookmarking and blogging or dare I say, weblogging. Ironically, in some respects, social media has made a contingent of us remarkably less social, more stretched and less embedded in real kinships.

It is a jungle out there - how do you get noticed among millions of groups, billions of news feeds and hundreds of thousands of apps. Fact is - you don't - not in any sustainable way. A goodly percentage of us have placed our faith in "social media" and for most, it has been an experimental and unrequited love. More teenage crush than something palpibly meaningful.

I'll get on the same page for a moment so you don't believe I have lost my lid completely. Let's agree social media has revolutionized the internet and consequently how we spend an increasing amount of our time. It has provided the seed for smart organizations to think differently and early market movers to tap into its value. We have seen enhanced and sometimes surprisingly powerful benefits from social media with our client's programs. It is not a fad, it is here to stay and in a big way. My condolences to newspaper editors, radio producers and magazine publishers everywhere.

But in a very few short years, my prediction - the term will fade into irrelevance - all media will be social - no more need for the distinction.

And here's why the current fixation on social media is a bad thing, not necessarily for people but for business:

- it suggests that engaging customers can be boiled down to a type of media - check out how many company Facebook pages that are barren ghost towns to demonstrate the foolishness of seeing the benefits of a collaborative web through the myopic lenses of social media, be they pages, groups, blogs or feeds - social media is part and only part of an overall business strategy and a good percentage of its practitioners wouldn't know a strategy if it hit him/her on the front hood of a car

- the term "social media" is thrown around as inherently tactical and under-estimates by a healthy margin the strategy, talent and infrastructure required by companies to tap into its real value - it's great if John Smith can acquire a modicum of viralness by attracting 25,000 Twitter followers to his personal brand, what that has to do with Microsoft building an enterprise through social media is tenuous at best?

- the lifespan of attention on social media is fleeting - for example, the timespan of utility on one of my tweets right now is about 45 seconds given the deluge of activity on people's walls - businesses succeed and thrive based on longevity of benefit and perception - addiction to social media would make them vulnerable to the flights of fancy and inherent novelty and lack of loyalty among social media-ites - if you're comfortable as a business riding the heroin-like highs and lows of social media enthusiasm, great - most of us would like to balance out that rollercoaster ride with some loyalty promoting investment too

- in our rush to embrace the transparent and tentacled world of social media, brands have forgotten the need to embrace the equally powerful aspects of storytelling, influencer and key stakeholder seeding, media integration, smart content and a well-differentiated point of view - what is a business and brand if it isn't an idea or enterprise that stands for something different - open source and socialize all your decisions and watch your business turn the compromise colour of "mauve" not the potentially brilliant individual colours in the spectrum

- how much of social media is really social? Perhaps in the heady days of blogging (2003-2007 RIP) you could make the argument that social media had taken down walls but media evolves and starts to look like the incumbent media before it - bloggers became A-listers and more aloof to real engagement, the pace of content quickened, user acceptance increased to the point that even the best company and/or blogger can't keep up with the volume - social media is simply becoming much more broadcasty and less interactive - for most, this will in time become merely a different channel

- social media loves to eat their own children - there is a culture of "gotcha-ism" in the Twitter and blogging landscape that makes big companies targets - and yet the most vocal social media-ites among them, question why these brands are slow to embrace it (it's kind of like hiring the worst, cantankerous employee over for Sunday night dinner each week to tell you and your family how much they hate you). Reality is, the best engaged companies do not practice the "one voice, one vote" rule - show your commitment, knowledge, investment to get things right and influence companies for the better and scale the ladder of access to corporations; act like a social media troll or curmudgeon and wonder out loud why brands turn tone deaf

So for the smart money, yes - consider social media within the scope of your business plan, but don't, I repeat don't, forget about other important factors in rooting the much more important benefits of engagement with and advocacy by your customers, influencers, employees and fans:

I guarantee you that as we see the term "social media" bandied about, people are not talking about the above list of important items and if you as a business owner, take their advice as gospel and you will be blindsided by the lack of depth and richness of benefits you get back.

We've been here before. It's the boulevard of broken and inflated web dreams. Why does it feel like 1999 and people praising the virtues of Outpost.com shooting gerbils out of a cannon?

October 27, 2009

Social media has its own natural spin and hype cycle but what are the gold benchmark debates of social media; the "second Kennedy shooter", "artificial turf vs. grass", "Rowe vs. Wade", "Huxley-Wilberforce" equivalents.

The key ingredients to a a good debate is that there is enough real estate that people could be seen taken either side, that people feel passionate and strongly about a polarized opinion and that the discussion would be highly provocative and revealing.

October 19, 2009

I used to call it the "smell of a place". When you walk into a shop, a corporate head office or a boutique small business, does it appear like people love what they're doing? Are they genuinely involved in their jobs or are they merely going through the motions?

Frontline experience dictates at least half of the total experience many customers have with a company is with .

A lot of times, it's driven by the small things - next time you are at a Four Seasons look at how many of the small things are taken care of - we've come to understand that 82 items are routinely taken care of.

A lot of times, the torture test for the "smell" is what happens when the boss is not around. Take a visit to Westjet airlines for a 6:30am flight to get a handle on great customer experiences before the first coffee.

Sometimes, these experiences shake us out of our daily patterns and make us want to share them with others. Call them "acts of wow", "moments of magic" or "pursuit of excellence" but they make people buzz.

Some experiences of mine that recently to experiences going well beyond or below-the-call and have created conversations in my world:

the lifesaving customer service and first name comfortability of my local UPS store (Sherway Gardens)

the welcoming appeal of my local Starbucks - free coffee when I stand too long in line and the efficiency in finding my power cord (on Kingsway and Bloor West)

the patience of my Netnation server support people - thanks for not thinking I was completely out to lunch on a piece of malicious code we fixed together

On the negative:

the arrogance of a collected series of Visa customer service people

the unbelievable slowness of Staples Business Depot print staff

the tone deafness of my Bell business phone customer service staff

the ineptitude of craft sellers Durie Lane to find a matching urn (perhaps no coincidence the store is now out of business)

My view of each brand has been enlightened or pockmarked by individual employees embrace of their companies and work environment, and in some cases, outright disregard.

We've developed a 100 pt.survey for clients that cesses out a score suggesting top-level front line fanship, above-service standards and customer face-to-face engagement.

Arrive at a score of 85 and you are a fully-committed, Frontline Word of Mouth Evangelist, between 70 and 85 and you are an emotionally connected Frontline Word of Mouth Advocate and between 50 and 70 and you are a satisfied and loyal Frontline Word of Mouth Engaged Soul.

Let's not even go near under 50 as a score, although our belief is 65-75% of frontline staff operate at this level.

Here are 10 components to the survey:

i) Personal Assets (10 pts.) - do you have a natural set of skills that lend themselves well to frontline WOM?

ii) Company/Brand Alignment (10 pts.) - are you living the life and genuinely excited about the corporate/brand and their values?

iii) Customer Focus (10 pts.) - are you driven by trying to understand and satisfy customers?

iv) Experience Building (10 pts.) - are you committed to not only providing a service but an experience?

v) Consistency/Remarkability (10 pts.) - even on "bad days", do you still go the extra mile and get customers to rave about you?

vi) Team/Culture Builder (10 pts.) - do you improve the morale and customer service of the people around you?

In fairness, there are a subset of questions under each category and with many companies, we add and tailor specific questions that make sense for their objectives, culture and work styles to give us a fuller view.

Ready to take a Customer Experience Fitness test? Have a spin by Agent Wildfire if you'd like to connect with us on Frontline Customer Experience WOM Audit.

September 06, 2009

Sometimes we encounter people in life that work so hard to fit in, be accepted, be loved and are willing the put on a "face" or "show" to ingratiate themselves with their newfound social circles or professional milleus....but there language trips them up and reveals likely what rests at the heart of what they think as well.

Here it is, with the case of the traditional economic world (of whom I was a part of for the greater chunk of my career) and the new world of the friendlier, more collaborative marketplace - the community builders (for which I have put my stock and become an entrenched part of).

Beyond philosophical differences between the two groups, there is a cavernous divide in how these tribes see their craft, which makes it difficult for the traditional and new worlds of communication to cooperate, never mind getting past the semantics for discussion.

It shows up in how they dress, who they vote for, what they value, how they socialize, what they covet personally and perhaps, most visibly in what language they use. As in any turf battle, neither side is wholly right (trust me, there are some idioms and words of the new economy that drive me batty - "it is what it is", cloud computing. "just sayin' and usability come to mind ) but establishing some common English-French dictionary of sorts for each group might be important.

So move over Roget and Websters- here is a compendium of the top 50 words and phrases used by traditional business speak (rooted in the capitalist and militaristic language from which it has its roots) and the new community speak (rooted in the more recent, more activist and post-war culture from which it emerged).

5) Each speaker will be revealing new exciting ventures in an intimate and interactive setup, be the first to know

6) An announcement on what's happening with the 2009/2010 calendar of League of Kickass activities and final casting call for League of Kickass Under 30 advisory panel

7) For those wanting the full Monday out, our venue The Social's busiest night is actually Monday - right after our event, join the teaming hordes of Queen St.

8) Tired of Spadina or other... yawn...traditional venues for professional meet ups - take a spin by Queen St. and bring your professional posse out early to a number of cultural attractions before our event

9) Get your 30 seconds in the sun and stand on our Kickass soapbox, broadcasting what cool things are going on in your professional world to a well heeled audience